Thursday, December 17, 2009

Accenture Wants You To Know That it Now Hates Tiger Woods

Last year, Accenture, a global management consulting, technology consulting and technology outsourcing company, spent $50 million on advertising in the United States, with 83 percent of all that focused on Tiger Woods, their main man who was dubiously attached to their catch phrase, "Go on, be a Tiger."

After dropping Tiger last week as their leading spokesperson, because of what I'm now calling "Infidelity and Escalades," (that might the title of my first CD), Accenture has decided to go crazy ex-girlfriend, and delete anything and everything that has to do with Tiger as quickly as possible.

On Sunday, hours after Accenture ended its sponsorship deal, the golfer’s face was replaced by an anonymous skier on the company’s home page. His name was scrubbed almost completely from the rest of the Web site. The company’s advertising campaign is about “high performance,” and Mr. Woods “just wasn’t a metaphor for high performance anymore,” a spokesman for Accenture, Fred Hawrysh, said.

By Monday afternoon, Accenture staffers had swept through the company’s New York office and removed any visible Tiger posters. The next day, marketing and communications employees around the world were asked to turn in any remaining Tiger-emblazoned posters and other materials. Accenture marketing employees did not respond to requests for comment about the Tiger purge on Wednesday.

Accenture said it did not tell all of its 177,000 worldwide employees to toss their Tiger T-shirts, caps and tchotchkes away. But when asked about branded merchandise, Mr. Hawrysh said, “Our intention is to ensure we are no longer using it internally or externally.”

As part of their winter cleaning, e-mails have been sent out to employees urging them not to include Tiger in their sales pitch and anyone with Woods merchandise linked to Accenture is being asked to return it for disposal (read: the anti-Ebay move).

All of this stuff is rather ironic if you think about it. Companies like Accenture hired Woods because he was the most clean-cut athlete on the planet, they guy you'd want pushing your product because unlike most celebrities, he seemed like the man you'd want to agree with on business decisions.

Three weeks later, Accenture is going all Säuberung on Tiger, and all they're missing is a big pile in the middle of the office for the burning ceremony.

I'm not what you'd call a marketing genius by any means, but I think my first step would be to delete the ads that are actually being seen by thousands a day, like in airports. By some accounts, those are the ones that are still up.

(Also, it is worth noting that the Tiger-Accenture ads might rank at the top of the unintentional comedy scale. Just look at the one above. It has "exit strategy" as one of the things Tiger needs to focus on.)